Friday, January 07, 2005

Stubs

He gets on at a huge thoroughfare where a lot of questionable characters enter and leave the bus.  At first he doesn’t seem too fringe: his beige jacket is in good condition and fairly clean; his jeans still have some color to them and his hands and face, though deeply tanned, are not excessively dirty or weathered.  It’s only after several stops that I notice how his thick black hair appears to have gone uncut and uncombed for a very long time, and how his gaze wanders with either impatience or inquietude; how his feet are folded before him almost protectively and his fingers look thick and crude.  Still, he doesn’t smell noticeably, he doesn’t mutter or sway, and he maintains himself within himself as the bus rolls west. 

I’m reading or writing in my book or some damn thing, occasionally glancing over to him to see if he somehow reveals himself to me.  And then, he does.

We’re out in the middle reaches of the ride, where the streets are particularly dark, throwing the interior of the bus into lurid relief - the windowpanes, smeary mirrors reflecting our own interiority as we rumble along.  He looks down and digs a clumsy-looking hand into his jacket pocket, pulls out a pack of Parliaments.  Is he going to light one up?  I raise my eyes and prepare to scowl him into social propriety but he ignores me, flips open the boxtop and quickly tallies how many smokes he has left.  His face is utterly impassive.  The box, I notice, is battered, but he has carefully maintained it in its approximate original shape. After a few moments he closes the box and puts it away.  I’m relieved; I neither have to endure him smoking nor need I confront him about it. 

But his hand is still digging, now in his right front pants pocket.  He withdraws treasure from its intimate depths - a bundle, a bindle, a handful of something wrapped in a tired-looking coffeehouse napkin.  With unexpected delicacy and nimbleness, he unwraps the cylindrical hoard, revealing about a dozen partly smoked cigarettes.  I immediately smell the sour stale stench and re-ready my scowl.  He’s paying me no nevermind, though, gazing raptly on his clutch of stubby soiled cigs.  He selects the longest one and places it in his mouth with tender alacrity.  It rests on his lower lip as he deftly rewraps the napkin and slips his stash back into his coat.  Having then gone as far as he can, he makes no move to light up.  Rather, he leans back just a little in his seat, inhales deeply through his mouth, and his dark eyes narrow to slits.  And that’s how he sits for several minutes, till his stop appears outside the doors.  Then he stirs into awareness and softly steps out into the shaggy untended night, the stub still dead in his mouth.